The aim of this project is to design and build a smart optical metro infrastructure able to support traffic originating from heterogenous 5G access networks, addressing the anticipated capacity increase and its specific characteristics (e.g. mobility, low latency, low jitter etc.).  This infrastructure will also support a wide variety of services and use cases, with special emphasis on services from various industries vertical to the ICT.

Metro-Haul’s targets are as follows:

(1)  100 x more 5G capacity supported over the same optical fibre infrastructure

(2)  10 times less energy consumption

(3)  Latency-aware metro network in which latency-sensitive slices are handled at the metro edge, ensuring the metro network adds no additional latency

(4)  End-to-end SDN-based management framework, enabling fast configuration time to set up or reconfigure services handling 5G applications (specifically 1 minute for simple network path set-up and 10 minutes for full installation of a new VNF, and 1 hour for setting up a new virtual network slice)

(5)  Reduction in CAPEX of a factor of 10, plus a reduction in OPEX of at least 20%.